The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill! (idea)

More pertinently than the above writeup, which is utterly fictitious, this is the mantra of Zardoz, the big flying stone head that provides religion for the characters in John Boorman's 1974 film of the same name - one such character being Zed, played by Sean Connery. Zed is an Exterminator, a barbaric killer who, on horseback, deals flaming death to wandering peasants known as Brutals, in order to stop them posioning the Earth etc.

Periodically Zardoz arrives on the scene to deliver proclamations and spout the guns in question - literally, as they shoot from his mouth like water from a hose. 'Zardoz' was filmed in the Republic of Eire and, according to John Boorman's commentary on the excellent DVD (which has Spanish subtitles), when problems occured importing sufficient replica and blank-firing rifles from props houses in the UK, members of the crew who had connections with the IRA offered to supply Boorman with weapons instead. He politely turned them down. The majority of the guns are Lee Enfields, presumably WW2 surplus.

Throughout the film Sean Connery's character is armed with a Webley-Fosbery, a curious revolver which, almost uniquely, had an automatic, recoil-operated action, and a safety catch. Whilst most revolvers rely on a mechanical linkage between trigger and cylinder in order to chamber the next round, the Webley-Fosbery used the recoil impulse of each shot to perform the same function, the intention being to reduce the required trigger pull and increase the rate of fire. Unfortunately, the expense, mechanical complexity and slight pointlessness of the exercise did not help the pistol's chances, either in the commercial or military marketplace.

The film takes place on our planet after an unspecified apocalypse has eliminated most of the population, save for scattered savages and a small bunch of immortal intellectuals; the latter live in fear of the former and create an imaginary 'religion' to keep the savages from rising up. This explains the quote, which is a deliberate perversion of verse 8, lines 16-17 of the book of Genesis ("Go forth of the ark ... and multiply").

The DVD contains a French language track, and it has been noted by many that 'Zardoz' is a better film in French. From what I can tell the first lines, in French, are "L'arme et le vie; le penis est le mal, le penis tire le semens...", although my French est un petit voiture, as they say.

As Pseudo Intellectual points out, these words are also part of the opening dialogue, and are acutely embarassing to listen to if you're twelve and you've just persuaded your parents to watch a Sean Connery sci-fi film you've never heard of, thinking it might be like Outland or Time Bandits.